Videos

Singer/pianist/lyricist/composer/performance artist Amanda Palmer, a.k.a. Amanda Fucking Palmer or AFP, is the epitome of an American indie artist. She’s bold, unapologetic, bisexual, with awesomely hairy armpits and actual pubic hair. She organized an unbinding flash mob wedding between her and writer Neil Gaiman in 2010, then made it legal in 2011 in a private ceremony hosted by literary power couple Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon. Unafraid of addressing provocative issues, she’s fought against Prop 8 and blogged about her own abortion and date rape.

CDZA (short for Collective Cadenza) is a group of mostly Juilliard-trained music geeks (and we use that term in the most loving and respectful way) that “creates musical video experiments” — in other words, fun viral vids that play upon all sorts of musical themes and genres (think “Evolution of Dance” but with live musicians and no dancing). Ten months ago they created their inaugural “History of Lyrics That Aren’t Lyrics” (i.e. Sha na na na, doobie doobie doo, etc). Then a few months ago they started producing these videos regularly, one every other Tuesday. Some recent examples: “Mark Zuckerberg: The Musical” (“This is the dawning of the page that you share with us”) and “Aces of Basses” (a literal tribute to the Swedish pop sensation using five acoustic upright basses).

Today marks the second weekly installment of the Onion’s new web series, Sex House — a parody of The Real World/Big Brother/Glass House-type reality shows that pretend to be about something other than throwing a bunch of people into a Sartre-esque No Exit living sitch with a bunch of raging hormones and an endless supply of cheap vodka. It’s the first series from the Onion Digital Studio, which according to the Huffington Post, will focus exclusively on non-news parodies. The other three web series airing on its YouTube channel this summer include Lake Dredge Appraisal (think Antiques Road Show meets 1980s public-access TV), Horrifying Planet (think National Geographic meets When Animals Attack meets American’s Funniest Home Videos) and Troublehacking with Drew Cleary (think vloggers with delusions of grandeur).

If you’re completely sick of all the coverage leading up to the Super Bowl, I’m here to provide you with some relief (9 out of 10 bloggers recommend it) with this week’s YouTube videos that seem to be gaining steam on the viral Internet train.

5. From the hilarious minds of one of my favorite channels on YouTube is this catchy and easy-to-sing song “Hapi Berth Dey.” It’s “about an Egyptian river god who finds a place to sleep atop two sheep” that also possibly doubles as an expression of his outrage of the misappropriation of copyright laws which legally also applies to a popular song traditionally sung to celebrate birthdays. Feel free to sing this new song coincidentally at your next birthday party!

When we were sent a link to the new YouTube video “Bounce That Dick” on the Jenna Marbles channel, we didn’t know what to expect: some kind of safe-for-work sexual technique advice video by a porn star turned educator? Then, during the first 30 seconds, our hopes were raised, as the young “blogger and entertainer” began a rap parody, stating with much braggadocio, “I’ve been told since the day I started growing pubes to shake my ass. Well, guess what, my ass is fucking tired as shit. This time it’s your turn to wiggle your man junk for me. I wanna see you shake your muthafuckin penis, bitch.”

One of our favorite sex toy retailers across the pond, Love Honey, really knows how to have fun with holidays. A few Halloweens ago they sent us a bunch of “Death by Orgasm” bullet vibes packaged in cute little coffins that we gave out to our Halloween Haiku contest winners (Lo also awarded one to the best costume winner at her annual Halloween party). This Halloween, they’re doing it again with a video series entitled “How to Defeat Zombies Using Sex Toys.” The production value is almost as good as…

Australian auteur Rick Mereki and Tim White created this wonderful travel video titled MOVE, commissioned by STA Australia, that has rapidly gone viral around the tubes of the Internet. Starring one lucky dude Andrew Lees, these guys traveled a total of 38,000 miles to 11 countries over the course of 44 days. I recommend just clicking on the play button above and watching it for the first time without any spoiler explanation. That said, I love the way their editing rapidly stitched together Andrew’s time in various locales around the world, some familiar and others not, into one coherent movement that underscores our shared connectivity despite our vast differences.

Passionate, eloquent, convincing, short and to the point — this is a defense of gay marriage made for the Internet. Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa engineering student, spoke out before the Iowa House of Representatives last week against a resolution which would end civil unions in that state by describing his life with…

Our L.A. writer friend Charlie Amter recently launched a labor-of-love blog called EUROPOPPED, what he describes as “a little epic sideblog” to “turn on more people to the crazy Euro music vids” he finds every day. And they ARE crazy. Or just foreign. Or maybe something is just getting lost in translation. Whatever the reason,…

You gotta love a movie trailer with lots of swear words, nudity, sex scenes and menstruation references. We don’t think we’ve looked forward to an Ashton Kucher vehicle since “Dude, Where’s My Car,” but the “restricted” trailer (NOT one of the many sanitized-for-tv versions) for his next flick, “No Strings Attached,” co-starring the ever-present Natalie…

If you’re a faithful reader of SUNfiltered, then you know we love us a good Ted Talk. So we were thrilled to discover that the two of us were in one! Well, just a fleeting picture of us, but we’ll take what we can get. Our old boss, Nerve.com-founder Rufus Griscom, went on to found…

Writer/performer/artist Merrill Markoe visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky last year and absorbed all the “proof” there that the world was created just 6,000 years ago and that dinosaurs walked among humans. As if through divine intervention, it suddenly, recently dawned on Markoe how to help the museum make their case. So she created this…

A few weeks ago we fondly wrote about the Know Your Meme podcast, and specifically highlighted their coverage of the loveable Antoine Dodson of “Bed Intruder” fame. Well, now he’s got what he (at least) is calling the # 1 Halloween get-up of 2010: The official Bed Intruder Costume! And good for him — why…

A few weeks ago, Craigslist TV (on YouTube) launched their second season of mini-documentaries based on real Craigslist ads. (Watch the trailer for the series here.) If you think reading the ads is great entertainment for inducing second-hand embarrassment, try watching them. There’s “Charity’s Casting Call for a Husband” and “Hollywood Superheroes Unite” and “Michael…

A great article in the NYTimes this past weekend about cyberbullying — and in particular cyberbullying over sexual orientation — included this line which really made us stop and think: “the punishment must fit the crime, not the sense of outrage over it.” It’s wise and it’s true, but we’d forgotten that — and it doesn’t answer the question, what do you do with all the outrage you feel? The outraged part of us feels that Tyler Clementi’s college roommate — who secretly filmed Clementi hooking up with another guy then posted it online, leading to Clementi’s suicide — deserves to go to jail for a long, long time. Same goes for the assholes who bullied 13-year-old Seth Walsh about his sexual orientation — Walsh hanged himself from a tree in his backyard last month and died after more than a week on life support. And countless other gay teen suicides across the country — often as a direct result of peer bullying.

OK Go just released their new video for White Knuckles. It’s not quite as cool or intricate as some of their other videos, plus all the dogs make it a little precious (maybe you have to be a dog lover to really appreciate it). But if we try to be objective, than we realize our…

We’ve been long-time fans (well, long-time in terms of Internet years) of the website and podcast “Know Your Meme,” a “web series and online database dedicated to documenting Internet culture, one scientismic investigation at a time.” They give you information on the back-story, viral development and spin-offs of every crazy contemporary meme out there, from…

He captured our hearts this past winter with his first breakthrough ad that had him going from shower to ship to white steed all in one take. At the end of June, he was back with another ingeniously absurd one-shot commercial, an awesome upping of the stakes of the first (log rolling? check! jacuzzi busting? check! flying? check!). And just last week, Old Spice Guy launched 183 — yes, 183! — individual video responses (all available on YouTube) to various Tweets he’d received from both big names and no names alike (e.g. Ellen DeGeneres, Starbucks, Alyssa Milano, Huffington Post, George Stephanopoulos, Demi Moore, Gillette, the list goes on and on and on). In just three days, the series had received 11 million views! The marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy has created a perfect storm of viral media for Proctor & Gamble using a beloved character (played superbly by Isaiah Mustafa), humor, interactivity and social networks. It’s hard to get worked up over being manipulated into giving away free advertising for a major corporation when it’s so damn entertaining!

How did we manage to miss this totally awesome quote from Ryan Gosling? In an interview with New York magazine about his upcoming movie BLUE VALENTINE (opening later this year, it’s a portrait of a marriage, co-starring Michelle Williams), he’s asked about his character’s tattoo of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree on his arm, and replies: “That book is so fucked up; that story’s the worst. I mean, at the end the tree is a stump and the old guy just sitting on him — he’s just used him to death, and you’re supposed to want to be the tree? Fuck you. You be the tree. I don’t want to be the tree.” Now we can’t decide which we love more — Silverstein’s book or Gosling’s quote about it.

Thanks in large part to a video made last December by Anita Sarkeesian of FeministFrequency.com that’s been making the rounds recently on the Internet, more of the world knows about the Bechdel Test.* Back in 1985, Alison Bechdel’s comic “Dykes to Watch Out For” mentioned “The Rule,” one character’s three simple requirements for whether or…

Ok Go is an indie band that has mastered viral marketing with clever, innovative one-shot vids for their songs. First there was “A Million Ways,” in which they did an awesome little dance routine in someone’s backyard. Then they upped the ante with a choreographed number on a set of treadmills for “Here I Go Again.” Then came “WTF?” — its psychedonkulous colors and patterns made you go WTF when you watch it (here’s how they did that one). Now, for the song “This Too Shall Pass” from their new album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky,” they’ve done it again — even better! It’s a giant Rube Goldberg machine in a two-story warehouse that moves along in perfect freakin’ synch with the song, all captured in one glorious take (after more than 60s tries over two days). You can read all about how they did it in this Wired article. Or, after the jump, check out the four video installments of “The Making of TTSP“:

“They want to be in your arms. You want to be in the stands. What do you do when Valentine’s Day falls on game day?” That’s the tagline for Puma’s genius ad campaign, The Puma Hardchorus, which allows hardcore soccer fans to dedicate and send a video of Savage Garden’s 1997 song “Truly Madly Deeply”…

I wrote an essay a few weeks back about Lady GaGa’s taking over from Madonna and becoming the numero uno gay pop icon. And any gay with a Facebook account can attest to this with a simple look at their status update bar from this week. The gays are going gaga over Bad Romance, the new…